Awesome
For quite some time now I've been using Fluxbox as my window manager of
choice. It's simple, clean-looking and relatively lightweight. Like
most other window managers, Fluxbox is a stacking WM, meaning
windows can be moved around freely and overlap. I've never really
worked well with this design however, since I tend to open lots of
terminal windows and forget to close them. Eventually I have so many
windows open it's hard to find anything, so I either have to spend time
figuring out which ones I need and which I don't, or just let them be
and open yet another terminal. Obviously, this only makes the situation
worse.
To solve this problem, I recently switched to Awesome, a tiling window manager. Unlike stacking WMs, tiling WMs try to automatically arrange all of your on-screen windows so that they don't overlap (although most also support "floating" windows like you get with a stacking WM). Basically, when you open the first window it uses the entire screen. When a second window is opened, the screen will be divided between the two. If you close a window, the space it used is divided amongst the other windows, automatically resizing them as necessary to fill the space. This way you don't have to go manually moving and resizing everything.
Additionally, Awesome uses Lua for its configuration file, so it is
much more extensible than many other window managers (tiling or
not). Finally, like other tiling WMs, you can use the keyboard to do
everything in Awesome, although you can use the mouse as well.
posted at: 14:14 | path: /computers/linux/apps/x11 | permanent link to this entry
Tweaking Firefox's Popup Blocker
Recently advertisers have figured out how to get around firefox's popup blocker. Normally, firefox blocks popups except for those that happen within a specified interval of user actions like click, double click, submit, etc. The problem is that some sites like zophar.net are set up so that most links have a javascript onClick handler that displays a popup ad. There's a way around this. Modify the dom.popup_allowed_events property to have the value 'change #click dblclick #mouseup reset submit'. This property specifies which events may create popup windows.
Commenting out 'mouseup' and 'click' allows popups associated with forms to work but stops onClick ads. Unfortunately, it also breaks sites that use onClick to do something useful, like display an image in a new window (which is still evil, but at least it's not an ad). If this breaks a particular site, set firefox to allow popup ads from it.
See this Slashdot thread for more useful stuff.
posted at: 09:04 | path: /computers/linux/apps/firefox | permanent link to this entry
Vi Keybindings for Firefox
I have finally figured out how to make firefox recognize vi keybindings. Below are the steps required to make it work on Debian boxes (most of them work for all unix platforms):
1. Copy /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/chrome/browser.jar to your $HOME/.firefox/default/xxxxxx.xxx/chrome directory.
2. Unzip browser.jar and edit the content/browser/browser.xul file, adding the following lines to the end of the
3. Edit the $HOME/.firefox/default/xxxxxx.xxx/chrome/chrome.rdf file. Add the following attribute to the
<key key="," command="Browser:Back"/>
<key key="." command="Browser:Forward"/>
<key key="a" command="Browser:Home" />
<key key="r" oncommand="BrowserReload();" />
<key key="r" oncommand="BrowserReloadSkipCache();" modifiers="shift" />
<key key="n" command="cmd_findAgain" />
<key key="n" command="cmd_findPrevious" modifiers="shift"/>
<key key="o" command="Browser:OpenLocation" />
<key key="O" oncommand="focusSearchBar();" modifiers="shift"/>
<key key="w" command="cmd_newNavigator" modifiers="shift"/>
<key key="w" command="cmd_newNavigatorTab"/>
<key key="q" command="cmd_close" />
<key key="q" command="cmd_closeWindow" modifiers="shift"/>
<key key="f" command="View:FullScreen" />
<key key="z" command="cmd_textZoomReduce" />
<key key="z" command="cmd_textZoomEnlarge" modifiers="shift"/>
<key key="s" command="View:PageSource" />
<key key="i" command="View:PageInfo" />
<key key="b" command="Browser:AddBookmarkAs" modifiers="shift"/>
<key key="b" command="viewBookmarksSidebar" />
<key key="h" command="viewHistorySidebar" modifiers="shift"/>
<key key="d" command="Tools:Downloads" />
<key key="p" command="cmd_print" modifiers="shift"/>
4. Copy /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/res/builtin/platformHTMLBindings.xml to /etc/mozilla-firefox.
c:baseURL="file:///home/ryan/.firefox/default/m2ukjd2m.slt/chrome/content/browser/"
5. Run 'dpkg-divert --rename /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/res/builtin/platformHTMLBindings.xml'.
6. Run 'ln -s /etc/mozilla-firefox/platformHTMLBindings.xml /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/res/builtin'.
7. Add the following lines to /etc/mozilla-firefox/platformHTMLBindings.xml at the end of the
Steps 4-6 prevent dpkg from replacing the modified file with the one in the package. If you're not running Debian, you can skip them and put the above lines straight into the platformHTMLBindings.xml file. You should be able to put the above lines into userHTMLBindings.xml in your chrome directory, but there is a bug in mozilla and firefox that prevents this from working. For now, doing steps 4-6 basically turns platformHTMLBindings.xml into a system-wide configuration file that will be preserved between upgrades.
<handler event="keypress" key="a" modifiers="alt" command="cmd_selectAll"/>
<handler event="keypress" key="u" command="cmd_scrollPageUp" />
<handler event="keypress" key="k" command="cmd_scrollLineUp"/>
<handler event="keypress" key="j" command="cmd_scrollLineDown"/>
<handler event="keypress" key="h" command="cmd_scrollLeft"/>
<handler event="keypress" key="l" command="cmd_scrollRight"/>
<handler event="keypress" key="g" command="cmd_scrollTop"/>
<handler event="keypress" key="g" command="cmd_scrollBottom" modifiers="shift"/>
<handler event="keypress" key=";" command="cmd_findTypeLinks"/>
posted at: 18:10 | path: /computers/linux/apps/firefox | permanent link to this entry
Yet Another FTP Client
I'll admit it: I'm a commandline junkie. I cut my teeth on an Apple II+
(literally: I started messing with computers at age 3), so to me a GUI
has always seemed foreign: nice eye candy, but not the real user
interface. I hate being tied to the window system to do my work, so
most of the applications and utilities I use are text-based. It bugs me
that I have to use OpenOffice to do real word processing and
Mozilla Firefox to browse
the web (for you fellow CLI addicts, I do use
w3m and lynx fairly often, but most sites these days pretty much require
a graphical browser to be useful).
I also get frustrated when I can't find a text-based or commandline
program to accomplish a task. For a long time, I've been looking
for a text-based sftp client that supports command history and
tab-completion. Today, I finally found one: yafc (Yet Another FTP Client). I could
tell you all about this very cool app, but instead I'll just shamelessly
steal the list of features from the project's website: